The news yesterday that Harbour Air, one of B.C.’s best-known aviation companies, has formed a strategic partnership with the huge Chinese power company Zongshen Industrial Group, signals an interesting new direction in Canadian aviation.
In doing the story that Zongshen had aquired 49 per cent ownership and 25 per cent of the voting shares, I was surprised to learn that China has no significant general aviation industry. (See also here.)
That may seem ... Read More …

San Francisco row houses. Okay, not exactly what Vancouver is planning. But wish that they would!

This is an interesting way of writing a blog post. I’m fascinated about the Twitter conversation taking place this morning over my last post on rowhouses, So I captured this in Storify. Have a look. You’ll need to go to the Storify link to get the full drift.
<div class=”storify”><script src=”//storify.com/sunciviclee/weighing-in-on-row-houses-townhouses-other-matters.js?border=false”></script><noscript>[<a href=”//storify.com/sunciviclee/weighing-in-on-row-houses-townhouses-other-matters” target=”_blank”>View the story “Weighing in on row houses, townhouses & other matters” on Storify</a>]</noscript></div>... Read More …

Vancouver is sending a pretty strong signal to its single-family neighbourhoods that they can expect to see more density as it tries to wrestle down a serious lack of affordable and family housing.
It may not necessarily be the tall 10, 20 or even 30-storey towers that you will see pop up in Grandview-Woodland, Marpole, Kensington-Cedar Cottage, Kitsilano, Kerrisdale and any other pockets of detached housing.
Those towers may yet come as the city rezones ... Read More …

What's an inch among friends? The owners of a strata building at 816 W. 7th Ave. in Vancouver have found out that even 7/8ths of an inch matters to the city, since their building's new rain screen will intrude that much on city property.

How can you measure City Hall’s interest in keeping things simple, at least when it comes to its property?
Well, with a ruler, it seems. And in the case of a strata building in Fairview Slopes, you don’t even need a big ruler. An inch would cover the job, since all the strata council wanted was 7/8ths of it.
That almost inconsequential distance is the amount their building, with a new rain screen applied, would ... Read More …

Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson recently sold his Point Grey-area home for a tidy $405,000 profit. Is he a real estate speculator, readers wonder.

The unusual public exchange of letters between Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and B.C. Premier Christy Clark over how to improve housing affordability shows just how complicated, and even intractable, the problem is.
Robertson has set his sights on cooling the market by targeting what he thinks are the causes: wealthy investors who hold property vacant rather than open it to renters, and property speculators whose constant flips incessantly ratchet up prices.
The premier, on the ... Read More …

So Vancouver is planning further changes to the Burrard Street Bridge, including removing another vehicle lane to give it over to bicyclists travelling northbound.
The proposed changes are part of a plan to dramatically alter the intersection at Burrard and Pacific, cleaning up a particularly messy interchange that always was dangerous, but made more so in recent years by the addition of separated bike lanes and the odd decision to ban pedestrians from the ... Read More …

Jes Odam, one of those quintessential "reporters' reporter", died Saturday at the age of 84. His tie, and his official Vancouver Sun obituary.

In this fast-changing era of journalism, when Tweeting or Facebooking some inane comment passes for reporting, and when hard-pressed media companies cut resources in search of a black-ink bottom line, Jes Odam’s legacy may be difficult to remember.
Jes, who died on Saturday at the age of 84, was an old-style investigative reporter who fundamentally believed in getting the story right. You can read John Mackie’s obituary about this legendary man here.
But I ... Read More …

Want to read, in Monica Lewinsky’s own words, what she told the TED Conference in Vancouver today?
Every journalist I know here attending the conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre filed a story on what Lewinsky, in a riveting and emotional way, had to say about her experiences following the public revelation she and President Bill Clinton had an affair in the mid-1990’s. My story is here.
But what you won’t find online – at ... Read More …

The Vancouver School Board’s shortfall for the upcoming budget year is now sitting at $14.77 million.
The amount was arrived at after a long and, at times, heated discussion, trustee Patti Bacchus said.
The district started the year facing a $27.64-million shortfall, made up of unfunded expenses, such as salary increment increases, increases to benefit costs like MSP, and inflation on goods and services. Other factors adding to the shortfall include an enrolment decrease and ... Read More …

The B.C. government used the gains public school teachers got after their strike last fall to boost funding to the province’s independent schools, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation says.
The BCTF says the rise amounts to $5 million more paid to private schools, all as a result of the teachers’ settlement.
“In calculating this year’s public funding to private schools, the provincial government included in the formula almost $82 million negotiated as the BCTF’s Labour Settlement ... Read More …

Spending and taxation will be key issues in November's municipal elections in B.C., a new poll finds.

It’s been fun to pore over the campaign finance disclosures that Elections BC has released from the Nov. 15 civic elections. But after all these years of covering this regular story, I am gobsmacked by the amount of money that was thrown around this time. We had a small inkling of that in November when the parties voluntarily released their lists of donors to date, but now that the official filing deadline to Elections BC ... Read More …

Jubilee House at 508 Helmcken, an old social housing project affected by the Brenhill court decision. (Gerry Kahrmann / PNG staff photo)

My piece on the weekend about the Brenhill court decision looked at the implications for Vancouver’s planning, community amenity and density bonus programs.
It examined the friction points that are created between City Hall, developers and neighbourhoods when changes are proposed that upset the status quo.
I received a number of comments from readers, some of whom blame the city for creating the impetus for higher, denser towers. Others made the connection between civic ... Read More …

David Carr, New York Times media columnist, dead Thursday at the age of 58

I came home from dinner out tonight and learned that David Carr, the talented media columnist for the New York Times, died today. He’d collapsed at his office and was pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Hospital a short time later.
For those of you keeping count, New York lost two great journalists within 24 hours; CBS correspondent Bob Simon, one of the great journalists and foreign correspondents of my day, died in a car ... Read More …

The B.C. government spent more than $350,000 on a social media campaign during the teachers’ strike last year.
The contract was with Kimbo Design, a Vancouver advertising company, and includes $50,000 for promoted tweets, $73,000 for Facebook posts, $6,250 for Google Adwords, $160,000 for digital and display advertising, Freedom of Information documents posted online show. There are also production charges and service fees, for a total of 4352,644.57.
The ads were targeted at teachers and ... Read More …

Well, that now-rejected glass tower proposal for 555 W. Cordova continues to spur commentary and concern.
On Thursday I received a note from Michael Green, the Vancouver architect known for his creative and stunning use of wood. You may remember that he raised the bar with the argument we could build carbon-capturing wood skyscrapers up to 30 storeys (which would be taller than the Gordon Gill/Adrian Smith proposal for the Cordova street parking lot. )... Read More …

Does Vancouver play it safe when it comes to the architecture of its downtown buildings? Are we a city largely of cookie-cutter glass reflective towers, eschewing “out there” contemporary designs that may make us uncomfortable?
Wednesday night’s rejection by the Urban Design Panel of Cadillac Fairview’s see-through glass tower next to the Waterfront Station was based in part on the fact the massive, angular building didn’t “fit” with its neighbours and that it was unnecessarily ... Read More …

There has been a lot said in the last couple of days about the proposed glass office tower at 555 West Cordova.
Some, like my columnist colleague Pete McMartin, think the blowback on this design from architects, developer and former planners, is overwrought and involves a fair bit of purple prose.
You can’t deny that heritage expert Anthony Norfolk’s likening of the building’s origami cutout to having been chewed by a rodent from Jurassic Park... Read More …

School districts in B.C. faced more than $192 million in cost pressures as they sat down to approve their budgets last spring. How that will translate this year is unknown until the provincial budget is released in February.
That estimated shortfall, which adds up to four per cent of the total $4.725-billion school-operating budget, was arrived at by the B.C. Association of School Business Officials and reported in a Freedom of Information request released by ... Read More …

Janet Fraser, the lone Green party school trustee on the Vancouver school board, was elected as the new vice-chair of the board on Monday night.
The school board is now split with four NPA trustees, four Vision trustees and Fraser holding the balance of power. Last week, Fraser voted with the NPA to elect Christopher Richardson as chairperson, ousting long-term chairperson and the city’s top vote-getter for school board, Patti Bacchus.
Board chairman Richardson did ... Read More …